Over the past decade the mobile phone has evolved from a voice-centric device into a mobile personal computer. No longer just for telephony, the mobile phone has become a multitasking tool, useful for activities such as emailing and web browsing. The current trends for mobile phones are toward the mimicking of desktop functionality. As a result, mobile devices are becoming enterprise endpoints with rich applications and core enterprise connectivity. Because an enterprise may need to specifically provision a mobile device for accessing restricted data, an employee may either have to sacrifice a personal device or carry two devices, one personal and one enterprise, to work.
From an end-user perspective, it is desirable to consolidate a personal mobile device with an enterprise device. Virtualization offers an opportunity to provide a convenient solution by preserving isolation of environments without requiring a second physical enterprise device. Co-existing virtual phones on a personal mobile phone represents a very attractive alternative to existing solutions involving multiple physical mobile phones. The rapid pace of hardware advances in mobile devices over the past several years has led to a class of mobile phones with resources capable of supporting multiple virtual phones where the virtualization overhead is small.
Virtualization on a mobile device, however, presents its own challenges. On a conventional computer, a virtual machine monitor (VMM, also called a hypervisor) typically has access to privileged resources on the host machine, which are otherwise not available to an application running in user mode. On a mobile device, such privileges are typically not available to the user. When provisioning mobile devices with a traditional hypervisor, the developer often has to partner with carriers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), so that the hypervisor can be tightly coupled to the underlying host device and gain access to privileged resources. Such requirements increase the developer's time to market and limits its market coverage to specific phone models and carrier networks.